Touchstone's Editors and Allies on News and Events of the Day

January 13, 2012

The Universe Just Happened?

Apparently the idea that there was NOTHING, then stuff just came into existence is something that some scientists feel comfortable with leaving well enough alone--after first claiming it as their own, and compatible with science as well as atheims. God need not apply, and there need not be any "creation." Nothing just does stuff like this all the time, I guess. From the article at Philly.com.

Empty space, as it turns out, can't be perfectly empty. Every type of matter has an equal and opposite counterpart, and pairs of particles and their anti-particles can spontaneously emerge from empty space and then disappear again.

One consequence of quantum mechanics' uncertainty principle is that a vacuum cannot remain perfectly empty forever. Not only will particles pop in and out of existence without violating the laws of physics, they have to.

This here is a false trail, and I don't know why the article even brings it up: space in our multi-dimensional universe is not the same as NOTHING. It has dimensionality, for one thing, of sorts. NOTHING has no aspects, no characteristics, etc. The universe from NOTHING is not about space in our cosmos. But the article does get to that:

How to get a whole universe to burst out of nothing is harder to explain. Scientists have multiple lines of evidence showing that our universe is expanding out of a so-called big bang. There's still disagreement on the details, but the big bang theory made specific predictions about the proportions of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the universe, which we can measure, and the presence of radiation known as the cosmic microwave background, which is also measurable.

It's not a matter of faith.

The currently favored version of the big bang theory posits that everything we see for light-years around came into being out of nothing.

"Harder to explain"? There's the understatement of 2012! You still have to go from NOTHING to bang! That's more than a quantum leap from one thing to another, from one state to another state. You don't have a state, a thing, to even begin with. They should just stop talking as if they have anything to say about nothingness and how it became somethingness--lest God answer them out of the whirlwind. We can't have any idea about something that is not conceivable, that is, NOTHING.

1 Comment

May I quote from 'God, Chance and Necessity', by Keith Ward?

"On the quantum fluctuation hypothesis, the Universe will only come into being if there exists an exactly balanced array of fundamental forces, an exactly specified probability of particular fluctuations occurring in this array, and an existent space-time in which fluctuations can occur. This is a very complex and finely-tuned 'nothing'!"